First Round post, podcast clips, and building an advocacy program

welcome back! sharing some of the latest from my world. as always, feel free to respond to this email if you have any feedback or questions for me 👋 

first round blog post

first round capital published a great post How Notion Does Marketing: A Deep-Dive Into its Community, Influencers & Growth Playbooks, definitely recommend taking a look if you’re thinking about these things.

next play podcast

published the third episode of the next play podcast last week, with Rajiv, CEO of Product Hunt. I’m really excited about some of the guests I’m recording with now. stay tuned and subscribe:

• Spotify 

• Apple Podcasts

we’ll also be publishing short clips from these episodes on twitter and linkedin, welcome to join us there!

my latest notion template

here’s the Notion set-up I use to plan, write, and ship social posts. i turned this into a template, available here.

Best practices from scaling an effective advocacy program at Notion

Notion’s Ambassador program was a huge driver of word of mouth, helping us reach millions of new users. What started as a group with a handful of Notion superfans, now has hundreds of advocates who have grown massive audiences and communities centered around Notion. I put together some best practices and learnings for startups looking to build similar programs.

Before diving in, here’s some background on how this program was started and what we wanted to accomplish with it. Back in 2018, when I met the Notion team for the first time, I was obsessed with the product. So much so, that I had built a website where people could share how they were using Notion. I also helped started a Facebook group for Notion users and I was buying up as many Notion domain names as possible. I was fortunate enough to meet Camille Ricketts, Notion’s formidable first marketing leader, and we started to work together shortly after (more on that here.)

One of our early hypotheses was that if there were people out there taking the time to spread the word about Notion in unique ways (I was one of those people) we could try and replicate that. I had seen a handful of Notion fans doing incredible things, ranging from people hosting workshops about Notion in Seoul, to writing a Japanese guidebook about Notion. I put together a Typeform asking people to apply, shared on Twitter, and started to review applications (the application hasn't changed too much since then.) Fairly quickly, we put together a very small batch of people to bring on board. This is how we originally described what we were trying to do with the program:

We want to bring together Notion's biggest fans and power users who love getting more people excited about what the product can do. We've been seeing so many meetups, classes, videos, and supporters pop up around the world — we want to meet them (and help them however we can)! The Notion Ambassadors program is about connecting these folks with each other, giving them insight into what we're up to behind the scenes, and supporting their events and projects!

The two primary goals around building this program were:

1. Drive awareness visibility for Notion (distribution)

2. Help more people learn how to use Notion (education)

Fast forward 5 years, the Ambassador program has grown tremendously and had a material impact on Notion’s growth trajectory. We learned a lot over the years as we built this out, here are some of those key lessons.

You need to have a product people love. Or at the very least, you need be building something people care actually care about. Without this, you won't be able to build an advocacy program. If you’re not there yet on the product-market fit side, you may consider building the program around a theme/concept instead of your product. Find an untapped niche, an idea that resonates with your ideal users, and try to build around that. Before we had a product built at Spoke, we did something similar, which I wrote about here.

Understand motivations. You need to spend time a lot of time talking to your customers/fans to understand what drives them to advocate for your company. If they're not yet talking about your product, that may mean you haven't solved for the point above yet. You should be able to find some common themes and similarities between these people. For example, in the early Notion days, the biggest superfans wanted more connection with the team. They loved the product and were curious to learn about the story. They wanted to know who was behind it and where things were going. The original premise of our Ambassador program was to connect these fans with each other and with the team, so that we could all be a part of this journey together.

Start small. 10 people who are deeply engaged and motivated to build a community together with you versus 100 people who are less engaged makes a world of difference. Work together with a small group of people to shape the core values and offerings of the program you're building. Make sure these participants are aligned and excited about what you’re building. You want everyone to feel like you're building this together. If it works for these original 10 members, it should be able to work for more people as you scale.

It doesn’t really matter what platform you use. There is no perfect tool out there. Use something that your audience already uses. For example, if you sell to design/engineering leaders, they might like Slack, versus if your customers are students, they might prefer Discord. When you're having these 1:1 discussions I wrote about above, make sure to ask where people spend their time online, what tools they use to connect with people. Ultimately, the platform you use won’t make or break the program, don’t overthink it.

Grow your program slowly. Be methodical about how you onboard new members. Don’t just go and add everyone who applied. In order for your advocates to build relationships with each other you need to give it time. These relationships are what will bring people back over time and ultimately help your program succeed. Make your application process long. That will help you attract the kind of people you want to have in the program, the people who really care about what you're building.

Make it feel special. If you’re running any other programs or initiatives on the community side, this is the one that should feel the most rewarding and exclusive for participants. Make sure members know how much you appreciate their participation. Make your gratitude obvious in your application process, onboarding experience, social media, and anywhere else people might see. Joining your advocacy program should feel like an achievement. At Notion, we made sure to onboard everyone in the Ambassador program through a small group Zoom call, and if they missed it, through a 1:1 call. We would walk through the program, talk about how to share their new membership with the world, and really try to make it clear how excited/grateful we are to have them on board.

Always look for ways to give back. You as the brand/facilitator want to make sure you’re the one giving more than taking. Make sure you have a clear set of guidelines on what you provide to participants as perks, whether that’s early access to new feature, swag, priority support, or anything else you can think of that might be appreciated. At Notion, we would constantly think of new ways we could be giving back to our members. For a long time, every month we would make sure to come out with a new benefit for members of the program. We wanted it to always be clear how grateful we were.

Be there to support your members. When building out an ambassador program, make sure your #1 priority is to support your members. Be available to answer questions, help out with requests coming your way, whatever it might be. Most of how I spent my time in the early days of building our ambassador program at Notion was fielding all kinds of requests on a daily basis. Some of these were related to their activities promoting Notion in different ways, some were more general questions, others were technical support issues. I made sure to be there helping out in any way I could, and if I couldn’t personally, than by finding someone on the team who could.

Don’t over-measure early on. Eventually, find ways to track the value created by your advocacy program. For example, by onboarding your members in an affiliate program you could track what kind of traffic/signups they are driving. Or even simpler to start, by providing a UTM link for each participant, you could see what kind of signups participants are driving as a channel. Just make sure to give some time to learn and iterate without looking for return on investment early on. If you start off on day one looking for ROI, you'll have trouble building something meaningful here.

Dedicate more support as you grow. At Notion, as we scaled our program, at some point I wasn’t able to keep up. I was lucky enough to hire two of the best community leaders I’ve ever worked with, Francisco Cruz-Mendoza and Emma Yee Yick who both took our Ambassador program to new levels, amongst many other things. If you want to learn about building community at startups, they are two of the best industry experts to talk to. At some point I’ll write another post on hiring community leaders.

To learn more about Notion’s Ambassador program you can head over to this page here. As always, welcome to reach out with any questions!

closing out

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